The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported four new domestic COVID-19 cases, all residents of Miaoli County and Kaohsiung, bringing the number of clusters or individual cases with unknown sources it is monitoring to 11.
The new case in Miaoli County is a woman in her 40s who operates a stall at Jhunan Second Market (竹南第二公有零售市場), a traditional market in Jhunan Township (竹南), the CECC and county government said.
The woman got tested after learning that two people in a cluster linked to a gravel supplier in Kaohsiung visited the market prior to testing positive, although they did not visit her stall, said Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center.
Photo courtesy of the Tainan Public Health Bureau
More tests are needed to determine whether the woman’s infection is linked to the cluster, he said.
The gravel supplier cluster has grown to more than 30 cases in the past week, extending to contacts of company employees, with cases recorded in Hsinchu and Miaoli counties, Tainan and New Taipei City, CECC data showed.
The source of the cluster is unknown.
The remaining three domestic cases are all Kaohsiung residents.
Two of them are a mother in her 50s and her son in his 20s.
The mother returned from China to Taiwan on Jan. 16 and only began showing COVID-19 symptoms on Sunday, indicating that she was infected in Taiwan and not overseas, Chen said.
The CECC is still looking into how the two became infected, he added.
The other case is a man in his 20s who works at a drink shop and whose source of infection is also unknown, Chen said.
Of the new domestic COVID-19 cases confirmed yesterday, three had received either two or three COVID-19 vaccine doses, and the fourth had not been vaccinated, CECC data showed.
Genome sequencing has been performed on samples from cases in seven of the 11 clusters or individual cases with unknown sources, which showed that they were infected with four different versions of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
The 11 clusters and cases involve 161 people in Kaohsiung, New Taipei City, Tainan and Taoyuan, and Yilan and Pingtung counties, CECC data showed.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy chief of the CECC’s medical response division, said that as the symptoms of the Omicron variant are very similar to that of a common cold, people should get tested if they experience cold-like symptoms and have visited the same places at about the same time as confirmed cases and might have been exposed to them.
Taiwan also reported 50 imported cases yesterday, 27 of whom tested positive upon arrival. The CECC did not release any information regarding the vaccination status of the imported cases.
Additional reporting by Lee I-chia
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